Spotlight

By Pat Ford
Pew Center Staff Writer

At KQED.org, visitors can “plan” their own small city. At NYcitizens.org, they can “redraw” New York’s congressional districts. While at TBO.com, they can click on a Tampa map and call up the major crimes in a selected neighborhood.

These are just a few of the innovative ways that news organizations are using the Web’s interactive capabilities to move beyond simply providing information to engaging their audiences in actively analyzing and using information. 

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By Pat Ford
Pew Center Staff Writer

They stand out like butterflies on the drab gray streets of St. Paul – the colorful, head-to-toe scarves worn by Somali women who have immigrated to the Minnesota capital over the last few years. But in the days following Sept. 11, the women vanished.

Amid the flow of national and international stories, it might have been easy to overlook this sudden absence. But reporters and editors at the St. Paul Pioneer Press – attuned to community concerns through years of civic journalism – not only noticed, they worked to bring these women back to civic life.

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Delving into the Divide: A Study of Race Reporting in Forty-Five U.S. Newsrooms

The Marshall News Messenger is a small paper, circulation 8,000, in a small east Texas town but its 1999 project “Twelve Questions on Race” was a big idea.

In a town where factories segregated their shifts and some whites used the Confederate flag to keep the light out of windows, a project addressing race did not get a warm welcome.

The News Messenger’s largest advertiser withdrew his business from the paper and white ministers who participated were threatened.

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Residents Laud Mapping Project; Seek Even More Choices

By Catherine Lee
Pew Center

Dean Nichols was surprised when he clicked on The Herald’s state-of-the-art Internet map and found no specific icon for a soccer field. Susan Adams found no fish icon reflecting the plight of endangered salmon around Everett, WA.

But that didn’t stop Nichols, Adams and hundreds of other residents from responding to the newspaper’s survey seeking their vision for about 600 acres of land along Everett’s waterfront. They responded on forms printed in the newspaper and via a unique clickable Internet map from their home computers.

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2001 Batten Awards Honor Civic Turnaround Efforts
Deep Community Work Sparks Results 

Washington, DC, March 26, 2001 — – The Huntington Herald-Dispatch and West Virginia Public Broadcasting swept the 2001 Batten Awards for Excellence in Civic Journalism for ambitious and interactive coverage of the single biggest issue in the state – its future without coal – and the creation of a groundbreaking database of how coal severance taxes are used.

Their “West Virginia After Coal” partnership joined two newspaper runners-up: The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the Chronicle-Tribune in Marion, Indiana. Both launched courageous examinations of their deeply troubled communities that have sparked encouraging turnaround efforts.

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Marion’s Moment of Truth

By Dana Clark Felty
Pew Center

Page one of the Marion, IN Chronicle-Tribune on New Year’s day featured the standard photo: the first baby of the millennium. In this case, twins had been born and the photo showed a happy mother and father with the newborns and a stash of gifts.

Marion appeared to be twice blessed. But, Chronicle-TribuneExecutive Editor Juli Metzger quickly learned that the photo did not reflect the full story of the twins’ lives.

The 21-year-old mother, Stephanie Watkins, was not married to the father. She was living alone in a two-bedroom apartment on $376 a month in welfare payments. Her mother and father tried to help, but Stephanie’s 17-year-old sister also had an 18-month-old child. The twins were the second and third child for Watkins and numbers eight and nine for the father.

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Health: Making a Difference in Allentown

By Pat Ford
Pew Center

They may not read every word of every story but there will be veryfew readers of The Morning Call who aren’t at least aware of”A Change of Heart,” the newspaper’s ambitious project to lower heartdisease in the Allentown, PA, area. 

The Morning Call has promised stories on the topic everysingle day for three years. In addition, the paper has receivedfunding for special events, such as health fairs, to promote theproject and measure its impact.

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“A Journalist’s Toolbox” Building Better Journalism
New Pew Center Videos Sharpen Core Routines and Reflexes

Practical tools to help journalists learn about what’s happening in their communities and do a better job of reporting the news are spotlighted in a new set of four training videos from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism.

Each 13-minute video describes deliberate strategies that reporters, editors and producers around the country are using on a daily basis to conduct better interviews, tap new sources, discover new stories and report them better.

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